THE PLACE OF POLITICS: POWERFUL SPEECH AND WOMEN SPEAKERS IN EVERYDAY PAIKWEN (PALIKUR) LIFE

Alan Passes
This article focuses on the practice of female scolding in a community of Paikwen (or Palikur), a native Amazonian people (French Guyana and Brazil), in order to explore ideas about power and speech and the phenomenon of political speaking. The article takes issue with claims that politics are to be equated specically with the formal public arena, and that political discourse is the exclusive province and prerogative both of leaders and of men, whether institutionally authorized or not. It is argued, on the contrary, that the everyday speech of common villagers, in this case women, is among other things integrally political, and no more powerless in effect than the so-called empty speech of Amerindian chiefs postulated by Clastres. It is further proposed that Paikwen womens scolding not only embodies their own power but also regenerates symmetrical gender relations, and thus the polity itself.

Much, if not most, anthropological work on the topic poses political language in terms of formalized speech used by instituted (Bourdieu 1991) speakers in the formal arena (Bloch 1975; Brenneis & Myers 1984; Duranti 1994).This article argues instead apropos Deuxime Village Esprance, hereafter Esprance 2, a Paikwen community in French Guyana1 that the everyday sphere can constitute, at least in Amazonia, a place where the verbal actions of so-called ordinary, and female, individuals have as much political effect on the process of community life as ofcial discourses. My choice of subject is motivated by the lingering stress in ethnographic studies of traditional societies on mens importance as speakers, and therefore social and political agents, which persists in eclipsing that of women despite research attesting to the contrary.2 Beginning from the assumption that only public speech is political, it is frequently presumed that because their activities are (supposedly) limited to the domestic, or private, arena, women even in egalitarian societies are silenced politically, and politically silent (Brenneis & Myers 1984; Overing 1999; Strathern 1988). It has been shown for native Amazonia that women none the less exercise their public and (hence) political voice through such context-related formal discourses as ritual wailing and the verbal aggression of enemies (Als 1990: 240; Briggs 1992; 1993). There is also evidence indicating the existence of female chiefs.3 Yet regardless of such regional data on womens public speaking and leadership, the focus remains principally on
Royal Anthropological Institute 2004. J. Roy. anthrop. Inst. (N.S.) 10, 1-18

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women as audience rather than agents (Overing 1986: 140; Rapport & Overing 2000: 152; Seeger 1981: 86, 89).4 This article concentrates on a gender-specic verbal genre, scolding, as practised in Esprance 2, to show that native Amazonian women not only contribute as productively and publicly as men to the conversation that is social life (Ingold 1986: 141), but also that their everyday womens speech5 can be political speech. By this I mean that in given contexts the speakers words have practical outcome in and for the societys ongoing politics, the latter to be understood in one of the basic senses of the word as the aggregation of relationships of people in society (Collins dictionary 1989: s.v. politics, 2) and anything associated with it. This includes here selfinstituted authority and the maintenance of proper relations. Scolding itself I shall describe, like quarrels, insults and intracommunity greetings, as interrelational behaviour that while not necessarily formal is not wholly informal either,6 falls in between the mundane and the ritualistic, and is as much public as private. Taking account of recent work highlighting the creation of embodied gender through the practice of everyday proper relationships making up Amazonian sociality (Belaunde Olschewski 1992; Lagrou 1998; 2000; McCallum 1989; 2001), this article also explores how Paikwen construct gender in the pragmatics and performance of the interpersonal act of scolding. Anthropologys relative lack of concern for the everyday talk of indigenous peoples7 stems from an assumption that what gets said in the everyday sphere and who says it, especially where female discourse is involved, are sociologically but a function of what gets said in the political and ritual spheres, and also culturally less signicant.8 Linked to this is the notion that while the (almost-always male) persons operating in the latter sphere are authorized by the group to speak (Bourdieu 1991: 72-6), they are somehow separate from the everyday world that they speak for (Rapport & Overing 2000: 338-40; Sahlins 1972), and on which they act through their words. The paradigm whereby men alone have a public, and social-political, voice, which is encountered in the accounts of egalitarian Pacic and Amazonian peoples largely rests on two perceived factors. These are universal male dominance and womans equivalence with nature, and thus disorder, rather than culture (Gregor & Tuzin 2001a; 2001b; MacCormack & Strathern 1980; Moore 1988; Pateman 1989). Although for both the Pacic and the Amazon there are accounts in which particular women stand out as publicly vocal individuals,9 women as a class are still widely characterized as conned to the domestic sphere and thus without power in the social order. Despite the extensive work by anthropologists and others10 documenting the intrinsically political character of the domestic sphere, and the power of women inside it and beyond, such views have proved particularly resilient. Their proponents often hold that womens discourses function merely to accommodate and reproduce relations of dominance, even while subverting and challenging them (Abu-Lughod 1986; Gal 2001; Moore 1994). This is emphatically not the case for life as it is lived in Esprance 2, as I show below: the people of this locality appear to consider women politically equal to men, and their deeds and words just as instrumental in the creation and maintenance of sociality and order.

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Some non-indigenous views on Amazonian gender

The male domination that is reportedly a common feature of many egalitarian societies in Melanesia is also sometimes found in Amazonia (Gregor & Tuzin 2001a; 2001b; Strathern 1982; 1988). However, in a signicant proportion of Amazonian societies gender relations are conspicuously more symmetrical, with women having political power as well as men. Because of the association in Western minds of the word Amazonia with female warriors, the notion of powerful women in connection with the region bearing that name may not be new; but it is contentious. For some anthropologists, the idea is understandable solely in mythic terms, as the reality is male hegemony and female oppression (Bamberger 1974). Other authorities maintain that it is male supremacy which is mythic and a matter of ideology rather than practice, and that in reality women are as aggressive as men both in ritual contexts ( Jackson 1992) and everyday ones (Siskind 1973). Another view is that conceptual and institutional egalitarianism exists but masks or fails to prevent pragmatic gender-based hierarchy (Descola 2001; Seymour-Smith 1991). Alternatively, there is the political-economic model in which elite males control and economically exploit women by means of ritual action (Rivire 1983-4; Santos-Granero 1986). Equally neo-functionalist are assertions that in Amazonia, as in Melanesia, ritual and mythological male supremacy is the structural and/or psychological means of reproducing social male supremacy (Gregor 1985; Gregor & Tuzin 2001b) and legitimating it (Bamberger 1974). Other scholars recognize indigenous female political agency as an historical fact (Renard-Casewitz 2002: 137; Viveiros de Castro 1992: 260), albeit endangered by contact with colonialism and capitalism as reported for Amerindians across South America (see e.g. Seymour-Smith 1991; Silverblatt 1987). However, female power and gender equality do exist today in Amazonia in certain societies, if in varying degrees from group to group and between subgroups. Although this does not always preclude male violence towards women in everyday life,11 it has been argued that Lowland Amerindian gender egalitarianism is practised even among peoples with a phallocratic ideological superstructure (McCallum 1989; 2001; Murphy & Murphy 1974).12 This egalitarianism typically manifests itself in sexual co-operation, complementarity, and interdependence in all productive spheres. It is expressed through a relative male-female parity of access to, and ownership of, the material and symbolic means of production, a relatively equal participation in the socio-political and economic processes, and the effective autonomy, authority, and power of women within the conjugal, domestic, and wider social arena (McCallum 1989; 2001).13 With many perspectives owing more to the ethnographers preconceptions (Freudian, Marxist, feminist, biological) than ethnographic realities, generalizations about gender in Amazonia are clearly invalid either way. As an objective reading of the literature will reveal, some groups are egalitarian, others not; and some are to only a limited degree, while others, including the Paikwen, are highly egalitarian. Hence, according to McCallum (2001: 158, 163-4), the advisability of analysing societies and sub-groups, whether they are presumed egalitarian or not, in terms of their particular situation in time and

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space and the pragmatic expression of their social organization. Undeniably, what was once true of a society may not always be so today.

Paikwen women and men: present practices

Paikwen women and men have equal autonomy, and women the right of divorce. Marriage is inter-clan exogamic and uxorilocal with brideservice (though the latter is now falling into disuse). Non-systemic man on woman and woman on man violence exists. For Esprance 2 people, the sexual division of labour is less marked than that of their Brazilian Paikwen ancestors, as recorded in 1925 by Nimuendaj (1971: 24-5), the rst modern observer to study the Paikwen in depth. Most tasks then classied as male, such as house-building and working for strangers, are nowadays also done by women, and female tasks such as manioc-processing are also done by men. Gathering and shing are traditionally activities carried out by both men and women and hunting exclusively male, though I know of Paikwen women hunters in other communities. Men, women, and also children co-operate in all horticultural work, bar site-clearing (male), and household chores such as cooking and infant-care. Nominally and/or pragmatically, most tasks today are bisexual, including some non-economic activities also termed work, like healing and being chief (Passes 1998: chap. 8; 2000a).14 It is through such shared practices that Paikwen children of either sex experience and learn gender equality (cf. Grenand & Renault-Lescure 1990: 31). A Paikwen woman determines the destination of her personal products, and what she wants in exchange, even when her husband does the transacting (Arnaud 1984: 35). She also controls the distribution of most domestic products, including the mans (such as game), and the money he earns in the market economy. Politically, communities are autonomous and designate their own leaders, though Esprance 2 itself is acephalous. The head of the main village in Akwa, the Paikwen homeland in northeastern Brazil, is recognized by some as a sort of pan-Paikwen super-chief (Passes 2002). Local leaders are sometimes female and women are active in political decision-making generally (Passes 1998: chap. 5; 2004; cf. Capiberibe 2001: 74). Paikwen women, then, are not conned to the domestic sphere, nor are men inactive in it. I turn now to a contrasting socio-political and economic picture drawn some eighty years previously by Nimuendaj, who visited Akwa in the mid-1920s and found Paikwen womens socio-political inuence excessive (Nimuendaj 1971: 92).

Paikwen women and men: past representation

The very rst sentence of Nimuendajs section on women (1971: 54-7) declares that, Of all the phenomena connected with [Paikwen] society, the most striking is assuredly womans dominant position relative to man. Plainly unsettled, Nimuendaj describes how this social and economic dominance apparently asserts itself. Until aged 10 or 12, he writes, Paikwen little girls

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are as friendly and sociable as the little boys, after which they look down on the younger members of the male sex and act highhandedly with men in general, strangers included. Once a woman takes a husband, his fate is sealed and he is fully in her thrall: [H]e undertakes nothing of his own initiative. His wife tells him when he must hunt, sh, and tend the garden [She] decides what goods he must purchase on the Oyapock If he resides uxorilocally, his mother-in-law also bosses him via her daughter The woman commands [T]he man but obeys (Nimuendaj 1971: 55). For Nimuendaj, then, the prevailing situation was one of female tyranny against which men but seldom revolt (1971: 56, my translations). Arnaud (1968: 10-11), researching the same area forty years later, disagrees, reporting male violence to women and male economic control. Nimuendajs view, reiterated by Fernandes (1948), Grenand and Grenand (1979), and others, does not accord with my own observations either (Passes 1998: 157 ff.). Rather, notwithstanding the aforementioned female control of the domestic purse-strings in both Esprance 2 and Akwa, which I have also visited, I would say that each gender broadly enjoyed, in principle and practice, as much economic power as the other. The same equivalence of power existed politically and in contexts where knowledge was concerned, despite the absence in Esprance 2 of women chiefs and shamans found in other villages. Wondering whether the Church might be affecting things through its injunction to women to respect and obey their husbands, I was told by Susana L.: Of course we do that, but so do our men respect and obey us. Thats the Paikwen way: wives and husbands respect and obey each other. Although one occasionally sees Paikwen women who exhibit a degree of aggression or bossiness beyond the permitted customary assertiveness, I would not qualify such behaviour, which is criticized by female and male covillagers alike, as generic female domination. Also, no Paikwen man ever told me he felt oppressed by womens power. On the contrary, many professed to be proud of it and considered such strength a dening property of Paikwen-hood. As villagers of either sex were wont to inform me: La femme Paikwen, cest fort! [The Paikwen woman, shes strong!]. Indeed, the Paikwen female social persona is as self-assertive and robust as the males, and can sometimes seem overbearing to a non-Paikwen. Hence, possibly, Nimuendajs account of Paikwen womanhood as domineering and despotic at a time when images of strong, autonomous, socially and politically active women were still seen as provocative and even threatening in many Western contexts. For my part, without suggesting that the Paikwen are frozen in time, I believe that the relations between the sexes today remain substantially the same as those reported by Nimuendaj early in the last century, that is to say (contrary to his own interpretation of the material), equal. A comparison of Nimuendajs empirical observations with my own reveals that, despite increased contact with the Western world and, in Esprance 2, exposure to an Evangelical Christian ideology with a strong male supremacist bias (see note 1), these relations are in practice not weighted in favour of women, as he himself and most subsequent observers would have it. Nor do they give precedence to the power and authority of men (Arnaud 1968; 1984). Rather, they are symmetrical overall, with women and men having equivalent and

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complementary instrumentality in the social, economic, and political processes outlined above. I will now consider two theoretical aspects of the last named of these, namely, the location of politics, and power.

The place of politics

The question of where politics take place is as fundamental, and germane, as who gets to do it?15 and what for? (cf. Brenneis & Myers 1984: 3). In their comparative survey of political speech in Pacic indigenous societies, Brenneis and Myers (1984) caution against the tendency to equate politics solely with the activities of men of power performing in the formal public sphere of ofcial grand events. For what occurs there is often more form than substance, with the actual business of decision-making or settling a dispute achieved unofcially, in the informal everyday sphere (Marcus 1984), and by women as much as men (Lederman 1984). Moreover, as Schieffelin (1990) and Duranti (1994: 144-66) show, the latter sphere instrumentally shapes the formal and functional features of the ofcial political one. The resolution of tensions through the negotiated interplay of actors interdependence and autonomy; their strategies and debating and performing skills; the mutual understanding of implicit meanings and values: all these factors are acquired and developed in the process of ordinary social interaction. Thus even the most formalistic political discourse is grounded in the practice, poetics, and meanings of everyday speaking. This indicates a difference between the two spheres not in kind but degree, a gradation effected by their common moral underpinning, as embodied in the similar linguistic, grammatical, rhetorical, and pragmatic conventions that actors learn from childhood in the mundane realm and manipulate in the formal political one. Such cross-contextual afnities disclose the political nature of what we might think of as private or less consequential activities (Duranti 1994: 146). Indeed, political speech itself, rather than reecting the political order (Bloch 1975: 1-28), is constitutive of polity, thanks to linguistic, grammatical, rhetorical, and organizational devices such as metaphor, indirection, and value-stressing. For example, they may provide a means of averting conict by safeguarding speaker-hearers autonomy. They also provide the conditions for individual exegesis and evaluation, thereby enabling collective agreement and solutions, as against the imposition of decisions from on high (Brenneis & Myers 1984).

Power
This leads us to the issue of power, an ambiguous one given cultural variations in practices and concepts (Cheater 1999; Fogelson & Adams 1977; Hamilton 1981: 79 ff.). In Western secular, rationalist thinking power is generally equated with the political (Anderson 1972: 67-8; Weber 1968: 212-45), and represented as an asymmetric relationship wherein the powerful possess power over others almost as though it were some tangible private property. Serious problems arise, however, if one insists on seeing power in native

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Amazonia in terms of a Western-type political economy, with its implication of coercion, differential access to the means of production, and in-built structural power (see Clastres 1987: 1-26, 189-218; Overing 1983-4; Rivire 19834; 1984: 87 ff.). As McCallum (2001: 157 ff.) suggests, in Amerindian societies where there is relatively equal access to material and symbolic resources, power and inequality are best understood, not as intrinsic to the social structure but as present to a lesser or greater degree in the unfolding of all social relations as it [power] is reiterated, negotiated and contested. There is also a widespread belief in Amazonia (as elsewhere) that power is immanent in words, with utterances being endowed with the cosmogonic power of creation and destruction. Typically conceived as a violent, dangerous, anti-social, and intrinsically extra-social force, power should only be allowed into society once the culturally appropriate actions have been taken to render it safe. Central among them is language, which for Amerindians, notes Clastres (1987: 46), is the opposite of violence.16 Brenneis and Myers (1984), addressing relations of power reproduced by the political speech event itself via such factors of social organization as who can or cannot speak, maintain as a given a notion of power relations that assumes structural dominance of gender or age. But is this model, relating to Pacic non-egalitarian and egalitarian systems alike, applicable also to Amerindian egalitarian societies? For example, as Clastres (1987: 1-47, 152-5, 189 ff.) argues, although Amerindian stateless societies are not apolitical the leaders themselves lack personal political power or institutionalized authority, and thus their political speech functions to recreate non-dominant relations. However, Clastres unconvincingly concludes that chiey talk, as a discourse not of power but powerlessness, is thus merely empty ritual, a claim rebutted by Belaunde Olschewski (1992: 97-8), Gow (1991: 127, 226-8), McCallum (1990), and Santos-Granero (1991: 301-2) among others. What I propose here is that we should be equally dubious about the supposed emptiness of the speech of non-chiefs, including that of women.

Chieess Esprance 2
As already mentioned, Esprance 2 had no chief, male or female. Pioneered in 1980 by migrants from Brazil (six adults plus children), it was at the time of my eldwork fteen years later a thriving community of some one hundred and sixty persons. None of the founders was regarded as its owner or leader (pace Rivire 1984: 72). Neither, as far as I could ascertain, had anyone sought the position. Nor apparently had it ever been foisted on anybody, although, according to informants, certain members of the original group, as well as some later incomers, possessed the customary qualications for leadership, such as organizational and oratorical skills. Notwithstanding the reputed natural proclivity for personal power that is the psychological prerequisite for the existence of human society (Lvi-Strauss 1967: 46), Esprance 2 did not appear to harbour a single power-driven individual (institutionally sanctioned or self-instituted) to whom others subordinated themselves. Although for Western observers acephaly is commonly identied with lack of politics or anarchy (Clastres 1987: 1-47), the community patently existed

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as an authentic and cohesive entity. It was also one in which politics were manifestly not a missing quantity, being empirically observable every day in the different activities fashioning and sustaining it as an orderly social corpus. In Esprance 2, political activity mainly takes place informally through egalitarian self-governance and ever-renegotiable interpersonal relations. Formal political meetings involving the wider community are infrequent. In such cases, and for big issues entailing relations with the non-Paikwen world, people seek guidance and representation from, and are free to accept or reject the authority of, a capitaine (headman) in a neighbouring Paikwen village.

A Paikwen view of speech and power

Unlike some Amazonian peoples, the Paikwen do not categorize speaking or hearing and listening hierarchically or along gender-specic lines. The Suy, for example, classify speaking as male and active, listening as male and female and passive (Seeger 1981: 84-6, 89-91). Rather, for Paikwen, to speak well auna kabai and to hear-understand well tchimap kabai are equally active, ungendered acts. This explicit linking of hearing and understanding and/or knowing is widespread in Lowland South America (see among others Fisher 2001: 120-1; Kidd 2000; Seeger 1981).While the Paikwen follow the equally common Amerindian custom of demanding that leaders speak well,17 such skill is not the chief s alone, for in practice every person is expected to master it from childhood. Good speakers of whatever sex or age are respected and appreciated, and ne talk is called pretty, baruyo, an evaluation informed concurrently by the locutors grammatical, rhetorical, and performative competence and vocal quality, and by the ethical and emotional weight of their words. The terms kabai, translatable as good,ne,well,right, and baruyo,pretty, beautiful, clean, proper, correct, lovely, and their opposites ka kabai and ka baruyo, do not connote moral attributes only, but also affective, aesthetic, technical, and practical values (cf. Rosengren 1998: 253-5). Good speaking means more than grammatical and socio-pragmatic correctness. It refers also to the axiological dimension of utterances: their moral and aesthetic worth. Another critical aspect relates to the ability to use words in a manner strong in knowledge, persuasion, care, and concern. Emically, good further signies strong in tone and volume; and the term auna kihao,to speak loud-and-strong, describes this technically correct and socially proper way of talking which is incumbent on Paikwen women and men alike and emblematic of their verbal performance (Passes 1998: 26-33; 2003). Among other things, speaking loudand-strong embodies a persons health, strength, and, beyond that, humanness (cf. Erikson 2000: 133; Fisher 2001: 119). Learning proper loud-and-strong speech is one of the ways in which girls as well as boys acquire the assertiveness that is integral to the Paikwen sense of personal autonomy. As with other Amerindians, great value is placed on the aesthetics of speech, including everyday speech, and on its presentational, phonic, and poetic aspects as much as its linguistic ones (Sherzer & Urban 1986; Sherzer & Woodbury 1987). Thus, for a Paikwen, hearing-understanding is more than a means of dealing with the semantic meaning of words. Through it one also interprets and responds to the style in which the words are delivered: the speakers tone,

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pitch, cadence, and loudness, the implicit moral values referred to, and the non-oral parts of the presentation. These are the performance features (paralinguistic, kinetic, sonic, affective, aesthetic, contextual) which, through the use of technique and artistry, embody, and project for each listeners evaluation, a speakers sociality and sociability. As a dening attribute of speaking well, strong talk is for Paikwen the requisite and most common vocal style of everyday verbal communication, and is neither reserved for ceremonial intercommunity exchanges nor limited to leaders, as happens among many Lowland groups.18 Like other Amerindian peoples, Paikwen posit a link between words and the potency attaching to them. In mastering good speech and hearingunderstanding, individuals gain access to the power of and in words.These are considered not so much the instrument of power as the active medium through which power is effectable, both positively and negatively (Hymes 1979; Isacsson 1993; Viveiros de Castro 1992: 223-51). As Evangelical-Pentecostalist converts, Esprance 2 people follow the Christian line that there are two powers. That of doing all things good is attributed to God, Ohokrij; that of doing all things bad to Satan,Wavitch, or, in Crole, Le Diab (the Devil). But the latter, greatly feared as an instigator of mischief and begetter of afiction, is also credited with benign acts. According to a (non-Christian) shaman informant, Wavitch is one of several pre-Christian super-spirits, amoral in essence, whose power can be brought into the community by, and transmitted through, human agency for either moral or immoral, social or anti-social, ends: a not uncommon Amazonian assumption (see e.g. Rosengren 1998). As elsewhere, too, this ambiguous power can be incarnated in a persons words. For instance, I once saw an Esprance 2 woman stop a furious argument between two co-villagers with the following condemnatory utterance:
Tchinogben (Women), Wavitch is in you to make you speak such ka kabai (ugly/ bad/improper) words! Wavitch is in you Putting anger into you! Wavitch is like a violent bird that comes into the houses! Wavitch perches like an angry takaag (chicken) and squawks, Aag! Aag! Kiaviy (Jesus) does not like it! Your words are ugly, angry chicken squawks the Devils screams! They disturb the whole village! Women, come back to Jesus! He will chase the Wavitch-chicken away!

Whereupon the quarrelling ceased. The cosmological power and authority underpinning political speech can belong, then, not only to the institutionally authorized and powerful but, as here, to the unauthorized people we tend to call powerless. It is now time to examine Esprance 2 scolding, which I suggest, though my example makes no reference to metaphysical power, is no less politically effective as a manifestation of womens power.

Scolding
Scolding, whose local name I regrettably failed to record (see note 5), is resorted to by Paikwen women specically, and always against men. The tone assumed for it is louder and stronger than for standard loud-and-strong speech, auna kihao, and charged with a combination of crossness, impatience, indignation, and asperity. Women deploy it, generally but not exclusively,

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against husbands and sons, in order to complain, demand, berate, recriminate, accuse (laziness being a common charge), sermonize, and vent grievances. Scolding voices, in short, express the very model of anger; however, the Paikwen distinguish it from dagaon, being cross/being angry, an illegitimate emotion feared for being socially divisive. Like other Amazonians, they value the positive virtues and affects (generosity, sharing, compassion, love, and so on) as constitutive of sociability and sociality, and condemn negative, socially destructive states like anger and greed.19 Linked with uncontrolled violence, ordinary angry speech is nowadays judged symptomatic, in EvangelicalPentecostal terms, of ungodliness, as shown above. In contrast, scolding is a measured, mastered knowledgeable act, and the emotion associated with it is thought of as legitimate. It is an aspect of proper assertive behaviour, including verbal action which in both sexes indicates not aggression or an anti-social attitude, but social and physical well-being and strength. Scolding generally takes place in the communal space before the houses. Sometimes two or more people, for example a woman and her sister and sister-in-law, unite to rail at some poor, improper, male object of their disfavour. Usually though, it involves a lone individual publicly inveighing against some kind of lapse on the part of her husband or son, as in this example from my eldnotes:
Ossis mother is screaming at him to either go hunting or earn some more money: they need food and his father is absent. Ossi stands there silently taking it while she goes on and on for all to see, arms raised and throat tilted backwards as if addressing the entire village and calling on the very sky as witness.

In Esprance 2 such action, a value of the languages affective register (Irvine 1990) whereby culturally constructed, legitimate emotional verbal styles are linked to given social situations and cultural images of persons, constitutes an aspect of positive female personhood. This is thus unlike the scolding conduct in Gapun, Papua New Guinea, reported by Kulick (1992: 104-17; 1993; 1998), where anger, while recognized as an expression of personal autonomy, is represented in terms of negative female stereotyping: lack of control, childishness, disruptiveness, selshness, non-co-operativeness (cf. Keenan 1974). Other differences between Esprance 2 scolding and Gapun scolding, or kros, outweigh similarities (for example, loudness). The former is monologic and directed only at men, the latter variably monologic and dialogic and either woman on woman (cf. Als 1990: 224-5) or woman on man affairs. Also, even if the anger displayed is justied and legitimate, kros is seen as antithetical to knowledge and is contrasted with oratory, the supreme male verbal genre. For the Paikwen on the other hand, scolding is a female attribute of knowledge, and oratory ungendered. Perhaps the greatest distinction between the two scolding behaviours is political. For, as proper gendered social action, the Esprance 2 variety constitutes a mode of speech that transcends the gripe and dissatisfaction of individual female speakers. In doing so, what it articulates are not relations of inequality, as in Gapun, but of equality like those described above. Paikwen scolding is both spontaneous and theatrical. By this I mean that, unlike the usual unfocused casualness of domestic rites, performances have a

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11

dynamic yet somewhat staged quality, and performers a purposeful air. Standing in full view of the community, legs rmly planted, her body taut and concentrated, her face at a stiff, resolute angle, a scold such as Ossis mother exudes righteous angry intent. Her very stance has, unambiguously, its own semantic value for others, the audiences reading of, and response to, a speakers emotion being instrumental for meaningful social intercommunication (AbuLughod & Lutz 1990: 11-12; Basso 1985; 1995; Brenneis 1990; Feld 1983; Irvine 1990). The scolds performance entails the striking of a tableau-like pose, through which she physically projects an archetypal role: the Aggrieved and LongSuffering Woman, the Ill-Provided-For Wife. In Antiquity such formulaic behaviour, by which orators manifested their emotions corporeally, was known as actio (Barthes 1976: 66).The Paikwen version is effectively embodied (and gendered) emotion experience involving learnt body techniques for the enactment of the passions towards a socio-political end (Abu-Lughod & Lutz 1990: 12-13). Acquiring the method from mothers and aunts, little girls of 5 and 6 are to be seen publicly developing their scolding skills by rehearsing them on brothers and male cousins. Paikwen scolding is the means whereby the scolder-actor calls on her audience, the community at large, to behold and hear-understand her grievance and its cause, and to judge the anti-socialness of the scolded. Theoretically, the latter, under the weight of this public presentation of his shortcomings, will be led (or decide) to comply, not so much with his scolders demands as such, but with group norms of behaviour. Somewhat like gossip, then, scolding is a form of social control. But Paikwen men are not as submissive as Nimuendaj reports; that is, when someone like Ossi is scolded for failing to satisfy a womans particular needs and wants, he does not necessarily go out and full his obligations (Ossi in fact went off to play football). That would go against the sense of personal autonomy and dislike of orders that Paikwen share with others in Amazonia.20 At the same time, however, and in contrast to what is reported for Gapun (Kulick 1992: 104, 110-11), Paikwen men do not generally defend themselves during the scolding, but remain impassively silent throughout. For Kulick (1992: 114 ff.), scolding enables (Gapun) women to assert their rights and autonomy in a society predicated on gender inequality, thereby redressing the balance. However, Esprance 2 women do not need to use scolding to obtain something which they already possess in practice, that is, equality. Conceivably, scolding acts here as a means of maintaining the balance when mens anti-social tendencies threaten to destabilize it (see Lvi-Strauss 1995). Paikwen female power is therefore not just dramatically represented in the interaction of scolding; it is embodied behaviour (re)productive of the polity, and heard-understood as such by both parties.

Conclusion
Like other Paikwen, and other Amerindians, Esprance 2 people consider the speaking action that is required of leaders to be fundamental to a communitys well-being. Acephalous themselves, they also perceive their own

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words to be just as instrumental in the creation of the proper and sociable relations comprising sociality and, by the same token, the eld wherein the political process occurs. Even in hierarchical societies this eld should not be equated solely with the formal public arena since, as was shown above, effective politics and political speaking also happen, and are constructed, outside it, through the everyday interpersonal relations of ordinary people (Brenneis & Myers 1984). Integral to this efcacy, and the politys verbal construction, is the dialectic between speakers and hearers within a common rubric for understanding among equals (Brenneis & Myers 1984: 12-13). This pertains to the process of interpretation not just in terms of semantics and pragmatics, but in respect of its instrumentality in the ongoing intersubjective renegotiation of the moral and, consequently, the political in communities without institutional political ofces, such as Esprance 2 (cf. Duranti 1994: 172-5). Given the parity of womens power in this society, their scolding differs qualitatively and functionally from the scenario described earlier whereby women deploy gendered verbal behaviours as strategic responses to an unalterable structural impotence. For Kulick (1993: 532-4), acknowledging structural inequality yet contesting its immutability, performances like Gapun womens scolding are not reactive but proactive behaviour. Such behaviour not only compels a response from men but is constitutive of social life through its power to recongure social relations and, in the process, to destabilize gender stereotypes, albeit reconrming them at another level. But this assumes a structural and sexual inequality conspicuously absent in Esprance 2. Here, as a verbal political act the scolding of its female members appears to constitute, not so much a prescriptive monologue (on proper male conduct toward women) as a (re)actualization of proper relations between the genders, which is congured and thought (and, by scolders and scoldees, experienced) on the basis of equal strengths. Thus, Paikwen scolding embodies female power within a socio-political frame that is founded on equal relations of power and dependent on the autonomy an ungendered value for Paikwen as for many others in native Amazonia (Als 2000: 134; Overing & Passes 2000) of each of its constituents. Moreover, the polity itself, while having no formal ofce of authority, is effectively recreated, and order reintroduced, thanks to the scolders temporary self-institution of authority.
NOTES This article developed from a paper presented at the Centre for Indigenous American Studies and Exchange, University of St Andrews (18 April, 2000). I thank the anonymous reviewers, Luisa Elvira Belaunde, Don Kulick, and Joanna Overing for helpful comments on earlier versions; and Catherine Als, Javier Carrera, Marie Perruchon, and Elizabeth Tonkin for discussions on topics contained in the article. The research was funded by the ESRC (Grant R00429334265) and the RAIs Emslie Horniman scholarship. 1 Numbering between 1,500 and 1,600, the Paikwen (aka Palikur) are an Arawakan people of French Guyana and Brazil. Esprance 2 is situated by the Crole town of St Georges on the French side of the river Oyapock, and had at the time of my eldwork (1993-5) some one hundred and sixty inhabitants, the majority Evangelical-Pentecostal converts. 2 See, among others, Briggs (1992; 1993; 1996: 222-7), L. Goldman (1986), Harding (1975), Jamieson (2000), Keenan (1974), Kulick (1992; 1993; 1998), Lederman (1984), Nash (1987), Ochs (1992), and Schieffelin (1990).

ALAN PASSES
3

13

See Viveiros de Castro (1992: 260), Fisher (2001: 116-17, 132-3), McCallum (1989: 223 ff., 247-8; 1990; 2001: 69-70, 102, 108, 111-17, 126), Overing Kaplan (1975: 51), and Passes (1998: 78; 2004), apropos the Arawet, Kayapo, Cashinahua, Piaroa, and Paikwen respectively. 4 Not that I do not consider the audiences role as active and constructive as the speakers in both intercommunication and politics (Passes [1998; 2000b; 2001]). The present article assumes listeners instrumentality regarding speakers meanings and intents (Duranti & Brenneis [1986]; Grice [1975]; Hymes [1986]) and a speech events wider meanings (Brenneis & Myers [1984]; Goodwin & Duranti [1992]; Gumperz [1977]). 5 Both scolding and the category to which it belongs, womens speech, are problematic terms. The former, though its use is technically correct, has a frankly sexist connotation in English; the latter presupposes a lesser sphere to mens speech rather than an equal and complementary one (Gal [2001: 427]). 6 It is appropriate to note that our conceptual distinction between formal and informal does not necessarily translate to native Amazonian societies, where there often tends to be either only the barest demarcation between, or a conation of, the two types of activity (Als [2000: 133]; Monod Becquelin & Erikson [2000]; cf. Brenneis & Myers [1984: 8-11]; Irvine [1979]). 7 The ethnography of speaking (Bauman & Sherzer [1974]; Hymes [1971]) and of communication (Gumperz & Hymes [1972]), highlighting context and socially embedded pragmatics, tends to privilege formal political and ritual verbal genres over everyday ones. Similarly, the discourse-centred approach, notably applied to Amerindian societies (Basso [1990]; Sherzer & Urban [1986]; Sherzer & Woodbury [1987]; Urban [1991]), acknowledges the performative artistry of informal conversation, but focuses mainly on formal verbal arts like myth-telling, ceremonial dialogue, and songs. 8 See also Duranti (1994), Kulick (1992; 1993), Monod Becquelin & Erikson (2000), and Schieffelin (1990). 9 See Duranti (1994: 70-1), McCallum (1990), Schieffelin (1990: 2, 10). 10 See, among others, Friedl (1967), Harding (1975), McCallum (2001), MacCormack & Strathern (1980), Moore (1988), Overing (1986; 1988), Sacks (1979), and Strathern (1988). 11 See Descola (2001: 99-100), I. Goldman (1979), and Murphy & Murphy (1974: 136). 12 See also Hill (2001), and Siskind (1973). 13 See also Belaunde Olschewski (1992), Conklin (2001), Descola (1986), I. Goldman (1979), Overing (1983-4; 1986; 1989), Overing & Passes (2000), and Passes (1998). 14 According to Capiberibe (2001: 74), although Paikwen women are inuential in the chief-making process they do not themselves become chiefs. This is contradicted in practice, however, by such individuals as Mauricienne, whom I met in the 1990s, the well-known head of a Paikwen settlement at Macouria, near Cayenne. 15 For example, in the West, according to Bourdieu (1991), politics, and political speaking, increasingly reside in a series of distinct institutional elds, peopled by various sets of professionals detached from the rest of society whose power, and voice, they seek to dispossess (cf. Foucault [1981]). 16 Cf. Bourdieu (1991: 163-70) on the invisible violence of language through which the dominant wield power over the dominated; see also Bloch (1975). 17 See, for example, Clastres (1987: 152-5), Lvi-Strauss (1967), and Santos-Granero (1991: 301-2). 18 See, for example, Als (1990, 225 ff.), Rivire (1971), and Sherzer (1983: 91-9). 19 See, for example, Belaunde Olschewski (1992), Ellis (1997), I. Goldman (1979), Overing (1989), Overing & Passes (2000), and Santos-Granero (1991). 20 See I. Goldman (1979), Kidd (2000), Overing (1988; 1989), Rivire (1984), and Viveiros de Castro (1992).

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La place de la politique : locutrices et pouvoir du discours dans la vie quotidienne des Paikwen (Palikur)
Rsum Cet article est consacr la pratique de la rprimande par les femmes dans une communaut de Paikwen (ou Palikur), un peuple indigne dAmazonie (Guyane Franaise et Brsil), et explore les notions de pouvoir et de discours et le phnomne du discours politique. Lauteur remet en question deux ides, savoir que la politique serait cantonne la scne publique ofcielle et que le discours politique serait lapanage et la prrogative exclusifs des chefs et des hommes, quils soient ou non autoriss institutionnellement. Au contraire, il afrme que le discours quotidien des villageois ordinaires, et en loccurrence celui des femmes, est entre autres de nature politique, et na pas moins deffet que le discours diant que Clastres prte aux chefs amrindiens. Il postule en outre que les rprimandes des femmes Paikwen, tout en donnant forme leur propre pouvoir, rgnrent galement une relation symtrique entre les sexes et, de ce fait, la polis elle-mme. 50 Hamilton Road, London, SW19 1JF . apasses@beeb.net